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Variously, a film/video editor, programmer, author, teacher, musician, artist, wage slave

28 August 2007

Sympathy for the Devil?

Earlier, I mentioned the "cutting-edge economic approach" trotted out by the Pentagon in late July 2003, for a few hours as it turned out. This was the Policy Analysis Market (and here), a futures exchange developed under the auspices of DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to try to amplify the information about events concerning the War on Terrorism.

Briefly, the idea of a "prediction market" is that motivated actors, buyers and sellers, can develop more accurate predictions about events than, say, opinion polls or other means. Presumably, this has been proven true in some circumstances to some people's satisfaction. In any case, it is an appealing idea on the face of it: get together a group of guileless, highly-motivated (greedy) buyers and sellers in a structured marketplace and you are bound to reap the reward of preternaturally aroused senses sniffing out accurate predictions. Intense self interest brings out the very best in people, after all.

The appeal is there, particularly if you are a believer in the magic of the marketplace. Such people, I believe, are so blinkered by their own Bear and Bull reality that the world is itself, beneath it all, an arena of vast opportunities for the bold but prudent investor. The obvious bias, akin to the Anthropic Principle, of making pronouncements about the General Goodness of Capitalism from the improbable perspective of the Last Man Standing seems never to occur to happy capitalists, as they continue to sow their faulty wisdom among lesser, and substantially poorer, economic beings. [This is never a digression in a world of dreadful inequities of wealth.]

However, I felt an itty-bitty, ever-so-tiny degree of sympathy for Poindexter because, impossible as it may seem, the forces that arrayed against him, particularly Senators Dorgan and Wyden, at least through their statements, seemed utterly opportunistic and moralizing and seemed to seek political brownie points by depicting a research program in cartoon-like terms (see links).

Not that the program was flawless, mind you. Poindexter, who graduated number one in his class at Annapolis and worked with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Mossbauer while getting a PhD, is certainly no idiot. His career took him to the heights of National Security Adviser under Reagen and the Iran-Contra affair resulted in multiple felony convictions in 1990, later reversed on a technicality. So, it seems that Poindexter, like many others, was fooled by issues of ethics and loyalty, making further government service uncertain at best.

Under Bush, loyalty per se seems to be a sufficient qualification, so, Poindexter, even allowing for his high-profile meltdown, must have seemed unusually qualified (particularly when compared with platoons of high-level appointees with absolutely no evident qualifications except a fanatical devotion). The Policy Analysis Market was certainly controversial, simply by dint of its being an unusual idea, but if such futures markets generate expert knowledge from the aggregate decisions of buyers and sellers, as claimed, one cannot fault DARPA for trying to implement it in some fashion. That the controversial details and Poindexter both were needlessly associated with the PAM represents a failure on the Pentagon's part, that may (if the assertions about it are to be believed) have needlessly crippled efforts to garner hard-to-come-by information.

So, the Pentagon should not be vilified for trying an unconventional technique to gain a predictive advantage. It is idiotic to blind oneself because it seems more decorous to do so. (This seems to be the argument of the Senators.)

But, given the way the PAM was introduced and Poindexter being involved with it, the public can be forgiven for rejecting it. However, considering the large number of secret programs, renditions, illegal detentions, torture, surveillance and the rest that have made their way into the twilight of public consciousness, the PAM seems rather tame, or even quaint, by comparison.

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